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There's been some discussion about this in recent weeks, so I thought I'd post a separate message to bring everyone up to date. (And additionally, now that the ebooks are pretty much out, they now have their own Forum area for discussing these matters.)
At present seven of the nine YW books are available online from Amazon (in Kindle editions) and B&N (Epub and other formats). One of the two missing books is High Wizardry. (The other is A Wizard Alone: the message about its present status is here.)
The source of the difficulty with High Wizardry is two sets of quoted material in the book -- the quote from Robert Frost in the front matter, and the extended quote from Steve Perry's lyric for "Running Alone" in the body of the book.
Permissions to use these quotations were obtained before the first edition of HW went to press in 1990 from Delacorte Press. However, DD has changed publishers since then. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt does not have copies of the original clearance agreements with Frost's publisher and Perry's music publishing company, and cannot publish the ebook until the legal language of the initial clearances is confirmed.
So apparently a search is being conducted at DD's literary agent to see if they have copies of the original clearances. If they don't, Harcourt will have to see if the necessary document can be located at Delacorte, and if they can't find it, then they or DD will have to contact Frost's reps and Perry's reps directly for copies (you'd think they would have them).
At present DD has no sense of how long this process is likely to take. As soon as she hears anything, she'll let me know and I'll post the news here.
At present seven of the nine YW books are available online from Amazon (in Kindle editions) and B&N (Epub and other formats). One of the two missing books is High Wizardry. (The other is A Wizard Alone: the message about its present status is here.)
The source of the difficulty with High Wizardry is two sets of quoted material in the book -- the quote from Robert Frost in the front matter, and the extended quote from Steve Perry's lyric for "Running Alone" in the body of the book.
Permissions to use these quotations were obtained before the first edition of HW went to press in 1990 from Delacorte Press. However, DD has changed publishers since then. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt does not have copies of the original clearance agreements with Frost's publisher and Perry's music publishing company, and cannot publish the ebook until the legal language of the initial clearances is confirmed.
So apparently a search is being conducted at DD's literary agent to see if they have copies of the original clearances. If they don't, Harcourt will have to see if the necessary document can be located at Delacorte, and if they can't find it, then they or DD will have to contact Frost's reps and Perry's reps directly for copies (you'd think they would have them).
At present DD has no sense of how long this process is likely to take. As soon as she hears anything, she'll let me know and I'll post the news here.